Alan Turing: The Man and the Myth
26th June 2012
Eric Raymond has the goods.
The centennial of Alan Turing’s birth brings us the news that Alan Turing probably did not commit suicide by eating a poisoned apple, was not depressed at the time of his death, and that the hormone treatments intended to suppress his homosexual urges had been discontinued a year before he died. I am not in the least surprised by any of this; in fact I have been half-expecting such inversions ever since I began noticing, twenty years or so ago, the increasing mythologization of Turing’s life.
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Ada Lovelace has been falsely mythologized as the first programmer because she was a woman. In a present struggling with issues of sexual equality, her femaleness has served propaganda purposes too obvious to need rehearsing. Turing’s homosexuality, too, has become a sort of marker or talking point in today’s culture wars.